Flying Off Everest by Dave Costello Read Free Book Online Page A

the floors, and cooking meals of dal bhat for Gaillard and his wife. Babu did this happily in exchange for a small amount of pay, a place to sleep, and the chance to use Gaillard’s rental kayaks daily.
    After learning some basic paddle strokes, which allowed him to move forward in a straight line and turn on the flat, unmoving water of Phewa Tal, Babu was then shown how to roll the boat right side up without having to exit the kayak, in the event it should ever flip over with him inside of it. It is a decidedly tricky maneuver for a beginner,known monosyllabically throughout the paddling community simply as a “roll.” It required him to, essentially, bend his spine sideways, in the shape of a large
C,
and then attempt to knee himself as hard as possible in the head, thus flipping himself and the kayak right side up. It takes most beginning paddlers months of continual practice to gain any amount of proficiency at it. Babu was consistently rolling his kayak in the lake within a few weeks.
    “He became a strong paddler very quick,” Gaillard says. The only problem was Babu didn’t have anyone to go kayaking with. Gaillard was a rafter, not a kayaker. And all of Babu’s Nepali coworkers only went kayaking when they were guiding, safety boating for the rafts that carried paying clients. They couldn’t afford to take the time to teach Babu how to paddle safely on a river, let alone take the time to repeatedly rescue him if he swam out of his boat, which is what beginning kayakers have a tendency to do. Babu needed someone to be on the river with him, teaching him one-on-one and rescuing him when he, inevitably, screwed up. There wasn’t anyone, though, so for the first year of his kayaking career Babu simply paddled around in circles by himself on the lake, venturing out onto the Marshyangdi and Seti Rivers only a handful of times with Exodus’s senior guides, preparing for the opportunity to work on moving whitewater, whenever it came.

    Pete Astles, a clean-shaven, square-chinned, thirty-three-year-old professional whitewater kayaker from England, had just set his bag down in his hotel room in Lakeside when the phone sitting on the small bedside table next to him rang. He picked up the receiver. “There’s someone here to see you, Mr. Astles,” the voice of the hotel receptionist told him. The line was disconnected before he could ask who it was. Astles found this curious, considering he had just stepped off the bus from Kathmandu. As far as he knew, no one besides the eleven other international kayakers he was traveling with even knew he was there,and none of them would have asked the receptionist to call him from the lobby. They knew where his room was and would have just walked up to his door and knocked. He walked downstairs to reception, where he was greeted enthusiastically by a short, excited-looking Nepali teen with clear, shinning eyes and an ear-to-ear grin.
    “You must go kayaking with me!” the young man exclaimed, quickly pumping Astles’s arm with an overly firm but heartfelt handshake. Only after some hurried, confused discussion did Astles discover that the boy’s name was Babu and that his boss, their mutual friend Charley Gaillard at the Ganesh Kayak Shop, had suggested Babu go seek him out. Gaillard had known that Astles was going to be in town that month for the Himalayan Whitewater Challenge, a kayaking festival held annually in Pokhara, which Astles helped host each year through the kayaking gear company he worked for, Peak UK. Babu, armed with this knowledge, had apparently started walking through town looking for foreigners with kayaks. He had seen the boats on top of the bus parked in front of Astles’s hotel and figured that’s probably where he was.
    “He basically pestered me until I took him paddling,” Astles says. Babu followed him and his friends to supper that night and listened intently to every word they said. According to Astles, “He just wanted to learn everything